Sermon Transcript
You may have come expecting to hear from Pastor Dave today. In fact, it may even say so in your bulletin, and I’m obviously not Pastor Dave. He let me know this weekend that he needed me to step in. He’s under the weather. And so what do you do whenever you’re told, hey, I need you to prepare a message, and I was gonna speak next week, and so he’ll come back and he’ll do next week, and we’ll finish off our study of 1 Thessalonians.
And so I was wondering, what am I gonna do on such short notice? So I did what I think a lot of pastors did, and I got out my iPhone, and I just asked Siri for help. I said, what should I preach on? And she wasn’t any help. No, I didn’t do that.
I didn’t do that, but I did go to Wikipedia, and I downloaded a sermon, and so that’s— no, I didn’t do that. What I was gonna preach on next week, I’ll just preach on here today, and we’ll finish out 1 Thessalonians next week when Pastor Dave is back, but we’ll be praying for him. Some of you know that my first job, out of college was, I was working with youth and leading music at a small church in East Texas on the border of Louisiana, at a very, very small town that has not grown in the 20 years since I’ve been there, and one of the things that I thought was so fascinating, having grown up in the city in Houston, and then moving out to the country like that, these people, and I don’t know if they still do this, if they’re even allowed to do this, but whenever I moved out there, I was fascinated by how they would take care of their yard and their acreage. They would burn things. They would burn things.
They would take their trash and they would put it in the yard and then they would just light it on fire, and I just thought, who does this? Who does this? And whenever they didn’t think that, you know, they wanted to mow the grass, they would burn their lawns. And it was no big deal to them. And if you were to go to them and say the words spare the air, they would just scoff at you.
They would have no idea what you’re talking about. You Californians, you liberals, you hippies, you people with your spare the air, spare me, you know? That’s what they would say to you. So in the spirit of, listen, I like fire as much as the next person, and so in the spirit of moving into the area, I got proficient at starting fires, and sometimes we would do these service projects with our youth where we would go to the homes of shut-ins and of other elderly people there in the church, and so we would do service projects for them, and there were occasions where they would say, I want you to burn our lawn, and I just thought, okay, this sounds like fun, and so, you know, I would get some of our older students, I wouldn’t get like the younger ones to help me, but we found that we could rake the leaves and we could put them in these piles, and it was really fun, we found, that whenever you lit things on fire, if you lit one pile, and then you connected it to another pile and then to another pile, and you have a little bit of gasoline, maybe not like a lot, you can have some fun because when the fire would go along and it’d go from one pile to the other, it would just boom, it would just blow up and leaves would go everywhere. And of course we didn’t have to rake it up again because we were just burning everything, and so we had fun with it.
Sometimes though it did get out of hand. Shannon reminded me that there was a time that she was burning either some leaves or some trash, and I don’t know if the wind picked up or whatever, and I wasn’t at home at the time, but our neighbor had to come over and help her put out an imminent forest fire that was prevented, which is ironic because her dad worked for the Forest Service. And so, but to her credit, she did at one point drive down the road a while later, and she did see a little fire, and she and a friend were able to put out a forest fire. So it’s not all that bad, but sometimes though you do want a fire to spread. Sometimes you do want a fire to take hold and to spread out.
You think about perhaps in a marriage or in a relationship when there are times that over the years you allow your romance to fizzle, or you sort of reach a rut in your relationship and you need to rekindle that fire in your life, or perhaps Like some of our students, they go to camp and they come back and they’re on fire for God. Well, you want that to remain. You want that to spread to the other students, including those who didn’t go to the camp experience or to the retreat. Maybe you’ve had a moment like that where you’ve gone to a retreat or to a conference or you’ve gone through a season of life where you were on fire in your devotion to God. You’re passionate and you’re feeling closer to him than ever before and you want that to continue.
Well, why do I bring this up? I bring it up because this is what we see with the Thessalonian church. If you’ve been with us all semester, you know that we’ve been tracking through verse by verse what Paul has written here in this letter to the church at Thessalonica. Thessalonica is still a city that’s there in Greece today. Thessaloniki is how it’s pronounced today, and you can go and you can see this impressive city that’s there, and so Paul, This actual person wrote an actual letter to an actual church that he had helped to found, and they were on fire for the Lord.
In spite of severe persecution, in spite of all the odds that were against them, this church that was only around for a few weeks and even months, and against severe opposition, they were on fire. And so Paul wanted to see that fire. Continue to burn. He wanted to see their devotion continue to grow and to increase, and for you and I, that’s so important. If you have missed any of where we’ve been so far, you have to see what’s led up to where we’re about to go here, Paul’s concluding remarks here at the end of 1 Thessalonians.
Paul started off in chapter 1 with a trip down memory lane with this church, remembering how well that they received him, And how well they received his colleagues. And not only that, how well they received the gospel, that the gospel, Paul said, came to them with power and with the Holy Spirit, with deep conviction. And these Thessalonians turned from idols to the living God himself. And Paul’s relationship, it was clear that he has a warm affection for them in his heart, and they for him, because he said he felt like a caring father, an encouraging father. And a caring mother with them, and he was pleased not only to share the Gospel with them, but his very life, and indeed, he did that.
But we know in Acts 17 that Paul’s visit to Thessalonica was cut short, and he had to be separated from them. And so in this letter, he’s telling them how much he longed to return, and he was not able to do so. Every attempt he made to return to them was thwarted by Satan. So Paul, anxious to know how the Thessalonian church was doing, wrote this letter, but he also sent Timothy, his trusted son, and companion, his son in ministry. And so he sends Timothy, and Timothy brings back this amazing report, and Paul is just overjoyed and giving thanks to God.
And this letter also contains some practical matters we dealt with a few weeks ago. Pastor Dan was here and shared with us that one of Paul’s desires was for the church to be sanctified, set apart and holy unto the Lord, and that that should be marked by a radical change in our attitudes in our actions, being set apart from sin. In this case, he’s talking about being set apart from sexual immorality. But this sanctification should also be evident in how we work and in how we treat one another. Paul also dealt with a very practical matter in chapter 4 of people, believers, who were concerned about other believers who had died.
And they were worried because what was going to happen to them? And so Paul is there to to assure them that they would one day be reunited with their fellow believers. But he also is there to warn them to be alert and to be aware that one day the Lord would return. He talks about that in chapter 5, about the day of the Lord. It’s going to come whenever we least expect it, the second coming of the Lord Jesus.
And so we need to be ready, especially unbelievers, because they don’t know what awaits them. And so this is what brings us to where we are right now, at the very last verses of chapter 5 that we’re gonna cover today, and then Pastor Dave will backtrack and do a little bit of the first part of chapter 5, or sort of the middle of chapter 5, but Paul’s concluding remarks here feel to me like a grocery list that you take with you to the store that’s just filled with things, because he’s just throwing out these staccato commands, rapid fire, and it reminds me of, I mean, you can almost picture him running out of room there on the parchment. He’s just trying to get every last word in that he can, ’cause it’s just filled with imperatives. Do this, and don’t do these things here. And it’s almost as if he’s doing what we do on birthday cards whenever you’re really wanting to express something, and then you run out of room, and so then you go off on the back, and you say, turn it over, and then you start going around the margins.
Paul’s trying to get in every last word he can here. Keep the fire alive, keep the fire of your devotion to God. Alive. Protect it. Let it grow.
Let it burn. So that’s where Paul comes to us, and we’re here in 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. We’re gonna be starting in verse 19. And the danger, I think, with imperatives— I mean, there’s a positive side and there’s a negative side with a passage like this— is that it’s extremely practical. You don’t have to guess what Paul is thinking here.
Do this, don’t do this. But the danger for us is that very often we, let’s admit it, we boil down our faith to a list of things that we do. I do certain things and then I don’t do other things. And yet God is far more interested in our heart and the reason behind why we do what we do or the reason why we don’t do certain things. And so let’s keep that in mind as we read this list of imperatives.
Paul’s not just simply telling them that a Christian is somebody who does certain things and doesn’t do other things. A Christian is somebody whose heart is surrendered to the Lord, and out of that motivation for what the Lord has done for us, we do these things. Starting in verse 19, Paul says, do not quench the Spirit. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt, but test them all.
Hold on to what is good and reject every kind of evil. Verse 23, may God himself, the God of peace, Sanctify you, there’s that word again we’ll come back to, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. For the one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it. Brothers and sisters, pray for us.
Greet all God’s people with a holy kiss. I charge you before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers and sisters. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. In order to increase and to protect our devotion to Christ, to keep the fire burning, to grow in our relationship with him, we need to do certain things and not do other things, and I just wanna point out a few of these things. Verse 19, you saw it there, do not quench the Spirit.
The way I put it is do not stifle the work of the Holy Spirit. There’s various translations For do not quench the Holy Spirit. Don’t suppress the Spirit, is what your translation may have. Don’t try to stop the work of the Spirit. Don’t stifle the Spirit.
Don’t turn away God’s Spirit. Don’t put out the Spirit’s fire. Really like that translation. Don’t put out the Spirit’s fire. Don’t stifle the work of the Holy Spirit, he’s saying.
To quench means to extinguish. It means to suppress, to stifle, to smother. It’s the— the metaphor is a picture of pouring water on an open flame. And so Paul is saying, don’t smother or stifle the work of the Holy Spirit, this fire that is within you. And throughout Scripture, we see that fire is one of the most common illustrations or examples of the presence of God with His people.
Going back to the Old Testament, when God wanted to speak to Moses and to appear to him, He did so in the form of a burning bush. When God wanted to lead the Israelites out of Egypt into the Promised Land, he did so by a pillar of fire. When Aaron and Moses were setting apart the priests to serve as unto the Lord, they created a burnt offering, and the book of Leviticus tells us that fire from God came down and consumed the burnt offering. When the prophet Elijah had a showdown with the prophets of Baal, Saying, the one who appears by fire, he is God himself. And so sure enough, God came up and just consumed the sacrifices there, there on the altar that Elijah presented.
We see that when John the Baptist came before Jesus, we see that he came and said that this Jesus, this Messiah who comes, will baptize you with what? With the Holy Spirit and and with fire. We see in the book of Acts that the early church starts with tongues of fire, what appear to be tongues of fire, coming upon these early believers that empowered them to do what God created them to do. And we see in Hebrews 12 that our God is an all-consuming fire. Fire is so common throughout Scripture to represent who God is, not only purifying us, but His presence with His people.
So Paul is saying, don’t stifle that. Don’t smother that. Don’t stifle or suppress the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. And this idea of smothering or stifling the work of the Holy Spirit, quenching the Holy Spirit, does not mean that the indwelling Spirit can leave a believer. Nowhere in Scripture do we see that.
When the Holy Spirit comes into the life of a believer, it happens at the moment of conversion, the moment that a person says yes. To Jesus Christ, and the indwelling Spirit comes to stay. But rather, to quench actually means that we can, even though the indwelling Spirit doesn’t leave, we can snuff out or diminish the work and the influence and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that you don’t quench a fire by accident.
When you put out a fire, you usually do so because you allow it to burn out, or you take steps to put it out, and similarly, the Holy Spirit naturally burns within us as a fire unless we do something or fail to do something that puts it out, and Paul’s saying, don’t quench the Holy Spirit. All this work that has been done in the life of the Thessalonians, Thessalonian church, don’t quench the Spirit there. Well, what is it that we can do that quenches the Spirit, or fail to do that quenches the Spirit, or suppresses or stifles the work of the Holy Spirit. Paul doesn’t give us a whole lot of examples here, but I think that, to me, one of the primary ways that we can see throughout Scripture of stifling the Holy Spirit is by simply us saying no to the Lord. Every time we sin, we’re doing so by saying no to God.
We stifle the Holy Spirit when he convicts you of sin and you resist that.
You stifle the work of the Holy Spirit when the Lord tries to produce unity and you or I step in the way of that from happening. We stifle the work of the Holy Spirit when he tries to lead us down a path of ever-increasing holiness, becoming more like Jesus Christ. And yet we hinder that because of our sin. There’s so many ways that we can stifle the work of the Holy Spirit. Paul gives us an example in verse 20 that we’ll get into here in just a moment, but the point is that I think that one of the reasons why churches today are perhaps as ineffective as they are and have lost their potency is because of individual members like you and I who, through any number of reasons, quench the ministry of the Holy Spirit.
And Paul doesn’t want to see that happen in the Thessalonian church. Don’t stifle the work of the Holy Spirit. So that’s the first thing that we see there, something that we don’t do. Don’t stifle the work. Allow God to be God.
Allow God to minister. Don’t stand in the way of where God wants to go. And I think anytime we share a message like this, it’s easy for us to think of other people. But rather than doing that, I would rather us again look within and say, am I stifling the work that the Holy Spirit wants to do in my own life? Am I suppressing the work that the Holy Spirit wants to do in my life, and in this church?
And to repent of that. But we also see in verse 20 a second way that we can increase, or grow, in our fervor, in our fire for the Lord. You see it there in verse 20. He says, do not treat prophecies with contempt. So we have, don’t quench the Spirit, and don’t treat prophecies with contempt.
The way I put this is, don’t take a message from God, Lightly, ’cause prophecies mean something that God has said, either spoken or written.
And we stifle the work of the Holy Spirit, this is an example of how we do that, by taking a message from God lightly. We read a scripture and we take it lightly. We hear a message from the pulpit or in our lessons or perhaps through a communicator that God is wishing to speak through, and you ignore it or I ignore it. So Paul is saying, don’t take a message from God lightly. Don’t downgrade it.
Don’t turn away from it. Don’t diminish it in any way. So what should be our response if we’re not to take God’s word lightly? If we’re not to take a message from God lightly, what should be our response? Well, we see it in chapter 2, a message I preached a few weeks ago there from 1 Thessalonians.
How did the Thessalonians respond to the word. Not only did they receive it and hear it, but they accepted it, not as a word of man, but as the word of God themselves.
And that’s how we are to receive a message from God. It’s from God himself, and if God is speaking to you, you’d better do something about it. And if God is speaking to me, I’d better respond and not take it lightly. It is the height of hypocrisy and the greatest mockery that we can relegate Scripture to a point of saying, I believe it, but then don’t do it. God desires us to be doers and not merely hearers, and so deceive ourselves.
So we receive it and we believe it, we don’t take it lightly, but on top of that, we honor God’s Word by obeying it. We do what it says. And Paul sees that in the Thessalonian church. But God is honored, and the fire is kept alive within us, and our fervor in our relationship with the Lord, when we take a message from God, and we take it to heart, we receive it, we do what it says. There’s a third thing that we see in verses 21 and 22.
He says that he wants us to test everything. He says that, test them all, test everything. Hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil. So he’s saying do examine everything carefully, evaluate everything carefully. Well, what is everything?
Anything that we come across, any teaching that we hear, anything that we, any message that we hear in our world today, we’re to evaluate it and we’re to take that which is good and we’re to hold onto it, that which is true, and elevate it, and then we’re to take that which is false and evil, and we’re to abstain from it, we’re to flee from it. And this idea of testing or examining is the idea of testing something and to test its genuineness, its authenticity. It’s the same word that we see throughout Scripture, the testing of metals to remove the impurities from it. And so any message that you and I have in our world today and to wanna know what does God say about that, We measure it against not what you and I think, but against the standard of Scripture. How does it conform to what God’s Word has said?
How does it conform to how Jesus lived and what he’s taught? How does it conform to the gospel, the good news of what Jesus has done to reach us? That should be the standard by which we evaluate everything. And Paul is saying, don’t just believe everything that you hear. And in this world in which we live, where there are so many messages, and I’ll be honest with you, it’s hard to know sometimes what it is that we are to feel about certain things.
You can sort of see it both ways, and it’s because over time, I think we’ve developed what I call a quilted theology. My grandmother used to make quilts. If you have a quilt, you understand that you take a scrap of this and a scrap of that and a little piece of this and a little bit of that, and that’s how we that form our worldview nowadays. I’ll take a little bit of this, I’ll take a little bit of that, and we create God in our own image. And Paul is saying, don’t do that.
Examine everything against the standard of Scripture itself, and against God by Himself. Rather than having a quilted theology that is consisting of a little bit of everything, we are to evaluate everything pouring into Scripture, saying, what does Scripture have to say about this? I’m telling our young people this all the time, that very often they have questions of, how am I to treat this person, or how am I to respond to this? Well, what does Scripture say? Let’s go back to Scripture.
Parents, if you want to see your kids become a person of the Word, always go back to Scripture. What does Scripture tell us? What does Scripture reveal about who God is? Because that’s the only true standard by which we should measure. Anything.
And I think one of the reasons why we’ve become so— well, why we’ve developed such a lack of discernment in our world, and even amongst us as believers, is because we’ve believed just about anything, and we refuse absolutes, and we stay away from the black and the white because it’s so offensive to us or to other people. What does Scripture say? Does it conform to God’s Word? Evaluate everything, test it all, hold on to what is good, Resist that which is evil. And then we see in verses 23 and 24 a final thing that we can do to keep the fire alive, and Paul expresses it in the form of a prayer.
May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. For the one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it. So we don’t stifle the work of the Holy Spirit. We don’t take a message from God lightly.
We do test and examine everything against the standard of Scripture. And then Paul is saying, to keep and increase and to grow in your fire for the Lord, I want you to let God sanctify you. Do let God sanctify you. That word sanctify, once again, we talked about this a few weeks ago, because Paul Paul prayed a similar prayer in chapter 3, verse 13 of this letter. We see it in chapter 4 when he’s telling them to flee from sexual immorality.
This idea of being sanctified means to be set apart, to be holy, to be separate, and in this case, to be set apart from sin. It’s as if you have sin on the one hand and you have holiness on the other, and sanctification is this idea of I’m progressively moving away from sin to be conformed into the image of Jesus. And we’re gonna stumble and fall. Our old sin nature stays with us, and so we’re gonna backtrack at times, but God wants us to ever increasingly move towards sanctification, to become more like him. And I don’t know about you, I don’t use that word sanctification a whole lot in my dialogue.
I don’t talk about sanctification a lot, and so therefore, because we don’t use this word, it becomes increasingly irrelevant to us. It becomes irrelevant to where you work. This word of sanctification becomes irrelevant in your home, becomes irrelevant in your marriage, it becomes irrelevant in your school, becomes irrelevant in your neighborhood, but the fact of the matter is, is it’s incredibly relevant, and it’s incredibly crucial, and I don’t want us to miss this here, because this idea of sanctification is the process that never ends, of us becoming more like Jesus Himself. It never ends until the Lord returns, or until we go to be with Him.
And suppose you’re a person who typically lies on your tax return. You withhold the reporting of certain private income. But then the Lord convicts you of that, and you realize that that’s wrong, because God is true. And so you look at that and you say that therefore we are to live honest lives. That’s sanctification.
Suppose you’re a person who is filled with anger, and you can lose your temper at the drop of a hat. And yet, God convicts you of that, and over time, you become slow to anger, as the Book of James tells us. That’s sanctification. Suppose you’re a person who mistreats other people. And is unkind, but God convicts you of that, and you realize that you want to allow God to shape you to become more like Jesus, because Jesus was kind and compassionate, and he’s kind and compassionate to you.
That’s sanctification. Somebody has hurt you, somebody has wounded you, and you need to offer forgiveness, and you know that, but what you feel is only bitterness. And yet over time, God heals you, and he enables you to look at your enemy and to not only love your friend, but to love your enemy and to pray for them, to turn the other cheek, to go the second mile with them. That’s sanctification. That’s what Paul’s talking about here.
It’s a wish, it’s a prayer that he’s prayed throughout the letter to the Thessalonians, and he prays it for them here. We want you to be sanctified, and in the case of Chapter 4, as Pastor Dan shared with us, if a person is involved in sexual immorality, which we saw was an all-encompassing term that describes anything sexual outside of marriage, whether it’s something that a person physically does with another individual, or if it’s something that we look at or consider in our minds outside of the context of marriage, and yet God convicts a person and they turn from that, That’s sanctification. In the case of the Thessalonians, they had a lifestyle of idol worship. They turned from it. That’s sanctification.
So what is the source of this sanctification? Paul says it there in verse 23. God himself is the source of our sanctification, the God of peace. He will do it. He doesn’t delegate the job to somebody else.
You and I are to train ourselves to be godly, Scripture tells us, We’re to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, but we need to let God do it in us. We can’t do it in our own strength because of our own sin nature, but Paul is praying for their sanctification, and he’s saying God is the one that needs to do it. To what extent do we need to be sanctified? He says it right there, verses 23 and 24. He says your whole spirit and soul and body through and through, that we would be sanctified.
When he says your spirit and soul, he’s talking about our inner person, our thoughts, our attitudes, the things that nobody else can see. And Paul is praying that they be sanctified, that we be sanctified outside but also inside.
How does God sanctify us? He does it, I think, in a variety of ways. When Jesus was in the garden, praying the night that he was arrested, he prayed that we would be sanctified, that future followers would be sanctified, and he prayed, he said, Father, your word is truth, sanctify them by the truth. And so we’re sanctified by God’s word. This is why we need God’s word in our lives.
This is why we take a message from God with great seriousness. It’s because we’re sanctified through God’s word. We’re sanctified and changed by God’s Word. We’re sanctified also through different commands that He gives us. We saw there in verse 22, abstain from evil.
Through commands like that, we are sanctified. We’re sanctified and refined through suffering, through trials, through circumstances, all in an effort that God has to move us ever increasingly towards holiness.
So we see the source of this sanctification is God Himself. The extent of it is our whole spirit, soul, and body, everything within us. And the goal we see here in these verses, the goal of our sanctification is that we be kept blameless until the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, because one day Jesus will return. Blameless does not mean sinless. Blameless means that Those who are in Christ Jesus are without condemnation, and we live a life as unto the Lord, realizing that He is ever-increasing making us more like Jesus Himself.
That’s the goal of sanctification, and the assurance that it will happen when the Lord returns. Verse 24 says, Paul says that it’s because God is faithful. He will do it. When God says He will do it, He will do it. So we see here in the last couple verses here of chapter 5, the end of here of his letter, again, he’s just trying to get in every last word he can.
He has 3 closing requests that we saw there. The first one, pray for us. He says, pray for us. Us includes Paul, but also his companions Silas and Timothy, and perhaps others that the Thessalonian church had interacted with or knew about. Paul had already told them in chapter 1, listen, we’re praying for you constantly.
Now he’s saying, would you pray for us? We need your prayers. As part of God’s family, let’s pray for one another. His second request is that they greet one another with affection, and he says to greet all God’s people, all God’s family, meaning don’t leave anyone out, even the troublesome ones, even the ones within your midst that don’t deserve that affection. Greet them.
And then thirdly, he says make sure that this letter is read aloud. I want you to read it aloud. They didn’t have a printing press back then. They couldn’t run down to the copy store and make some copies. It’s very likely that a number of people were also illiterate, or had some degree of illiteracy.
So Paul is saying, I want you to read this aloud, so that everyone can hear this message that God had given to Paul, and that they could then receive it, because we’re not to take a message from God lightly. We’re to be encouraged by this. And then he closes it with a benediction. That I wanna just close us with here at the end of our time. But in order to increase our fervor and our spiritual fire and to protect that in the Lord, there’s a key word here in this closing blessing, this benediction that he gives here in verse 28.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. This grace, this unmerited favor, that you and I receive, that we get what we don’t deserve, that God lavishes upon us his favor. It’s the only way that a person can come to a relationship with Jesus Christ.
If you’re here today and you are not a follower of Jesus, maybe you would say you’re not particularly religious, maybe you’ve never come to a place in your life where you’ve decided to follow Jesus, you need to know that You don’t need to drum up some energy, you don’t need to do a bunch of good stuff in order to get God to accept you. It’s through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that we are saved. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ is what sustains us and keeps us going and keeps our fire alive and keeps that fire burning.
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ Sanctify us. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ allow us to hear His Word, to receive it, and to put it into our lives. May the grace of our Lord Jesus enable us to evaluate everything, holding it up against the grace, the standard of Scripture. And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ allow us to let God be God so that we do not quench or stifle the work of the Holy Spirit. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with us all.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, it is because of your grace that we have any hope.
We thank you for your word today, this, this quick-hit list of things that we’re to do and not do. Lord, I pray that you’d help us to not get caught up in the imperatives, but rather to focus on the motivation. The reason and the heart behind it all. I pray, God, that we would surrender our hearts to you, that everyone here would come to a saving knowledge of you.
Thank you, Lord, that one day your Son Jesus will return, and I pray that when that happens, that each one here would be reunited with other believers, and would be there, Lord. You desire that none would perish, but that anyone, Lord, who would call upon you would be saved. So let that be the case. And Lord, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ guide us in the coming days. For we pray all these things in his name.
Amen. It was good to be with you. Pray for Pastor Dave. I know he’s looking forward to being with you next week. I’m gonna invite our worship team to close us here with a closing song.
As I customarily do whenever I preach, I’m gonna be over here on the side, and if I can pray with you in any way, I’d be honored to do so. Thanks for your time today.
